Indici ai bolli laterizi: digitised someday soon, hopefully?

So the only copy of Steinby’s ‘indici ai bolli laterizi’ in Eastern Canada is at the University of Toronto’s library. Drove down here to get it, some six hours in the car. Then another five hours flipping back and forth, back and forth, slowly trying to identify some blasted brick stamps… what a way to spend a lovely summer’s day.
You haven’t lived, until you’ve catalogued brick stamps.

I recall seeing once or twice that the whole CIL 15.1 was going to be digitised into a searchable database. Whatever happened to that scheme? It’s been several years since the ‘La Brique Antique’ conference at the French Academy in Rome, where Steinby and Kendricks revealed the plan. Of all the various ways computers could make life easier for the suffering classical archaeologist, this’d be top of my list…

Reading & Experiencing Space

When I was an MA student at Reading University (studying the City of Rome), one of the texts that we used was Diane Favro’s The Urban Image of Augustan Rome, Joesphy Ryckwert’s The Idea of a Town, and Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City. One of the things I took away from that experience was about reading and experience space, and the messages encoded in the urban fabric. One of the things that has always bugged me about reconstructions – whether written or drawn or CAD – is that, no matter how good they are, the experience and the reading is always at one or two steps’ remove.

Today, I was briefly at Vassar’s Sistine Chapel in Second Life. This it strikes me is an excellent example of how archaeological space and its reconstructions might be profitably done. For starters, the simulation takes control of your avatar so that you must read the code of conduct. If you do not agree to behave inside, the simulation dumps you elsewhere (how I wish the real Sistine Chapel had such an device!). Once inside, the space surrounds you. Because you can fly, you too can play the artist and poke your nose against the paint. Moreover, every fresco, every scene seems thick with information. Touching one presents you with a notecard with all of the information you could want about that particular scene.

The experience was tranquil; it was like stumbling into one of those churches in the back alleys of Rome that the tourists always miss… which I suppose raises some questions about whether spiritual experiences are possible in Second Life. But I digress.

I would love to see a reconstructed and annotated Pantheon; or a walk through the Campus Martius teeming with information attached: hyperlinked experienced virtual space… Imagine publishing your excavation in Second Life, a reconstruction where different layers could be peeled away, or ‘wall54′ tagged with all of the associated info, perhaps via a link to an online database. Publishing through Experiencing…

Persuasive Games

If you’re in doubt over the power of games, you may want to consider ‘FatWorld‘. You may have seen something in the press recently about this game

[...] about the politics of nutrition. It explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S. Coming Fall 2007.

We naturally equate ‘games’ with ‘fun’, but, as has been pointed out before, we don’t necessarily use ‘fun’ as a yardstick to measure novels, paintings, or other creative works. The creator of this game, Ian Bogost, has recently come out with a book that should add some ammunition for those of use who want to explore games for our teaching and research. The book is entitled Persuasive Games and it comes from the MIT Press:

 

Videogames are both an expressive medium and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this innovative analysis, Ian Bogost examines the way videogames mount arguments and influence players. Drawing on the 2,500-year history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, Bogost analyzes rhetoric’s unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already analyzes visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric.

Bogost calls this new form “procedural rhetoric,” a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. He argues further that videogames have a unique persuasive power that goes beyond other forms of computational persuasion. Not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, but they can also disrupt and change those positions, leading to potentially significant long-term social change. Bogost looks at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and education. Bogost is both an academic researcher and a videogame designer, and Persuasive Games reflects both theoretical and game-design goals.

I have yet to read it – but I will as soon as I have some denaro to spend – but the people over at Grand Text Auto have some good things to say about it.

Archaeological Clutter & Dumpster Diving

Richard Urban points me (thank you!) to the Second Life Dumpster which aims to explore those very questions mentioned in my earlier post. Fantastic! Second Life (and of course, archaeological VR in general) is just far too clean and tidy. I wonder if they can get the trash to be deposited in layers… what might be the mechanisms of deposition in a virtual world? In RL, the general principle is that older stuff gets deposited first; but in SL, would it be deposited by region, or a user’s IP? I wonder how it would pattern… it is interesting that the questions these artists are asking are, by and large, very similar to the ones that archaeologists ask. Colin Renfrew wrote a book on that very theme, though I haven’t had a chance to read it yet. Blurb about the book:

Contemporary art and modern archaeology are increasingly seen to share much common ground yet their interactions have yet to be fully investigated. This innovative volume explores key themes, including the role of display in art, in the practice of archaeology and in daily life, and the material transformations which underlie the physical reality of the archaeological record as much as the creative processes of the contemporary artist. Prominent practising artists Simon Callery and Antony Gormley provide seminal papers considering the role of materiality and embodiment in their own work, exploring issues that are directly relevant to current archaeological thinking. They are joined by archaeologists actively involved with visual approaches, including Anwen Cooper, Christopher Evans, Steven Mithen, Joshua Pollard, Nicholas Saunders, Aaron Watson and the editorial trio. The book is lavishly illustrated in colour. 170p (McDonald Institute 2004)

Mashing the physical and the virtual: ‘the internet of things’ and barcode archaeology

In this month’s Wired there is a piece by Evan Ratliff about Google Maps. What really caught my interest though, was a side-bar on page156, called ‘The Internet of Things’:

What if you could walk down an unfamiliar street, use your camera phone to take a picture of a building, and instantly know everything about it, from the architect to the list of tenants. The technology to make common objects clickable, like hyperlinked words on a Web site, is available today in the form of 2-d barcodes [...]

The side bar goes on to mention Smartpox and Semapedia.com, two websites that provide the user with bar-code print outs, and software for the user’s camera phone to read the bar codes.

From the Smartpox website:

What is a Smartpox anyway?
A Smartpox is actually a 2-dimensional barcode. These barcodes contain data that can be decoded using the Smartpox reader. You can create a Smartpox tag using a URL, an email address, a telephone number, or just plain text.

And from the Semapedia website:

Our goal is to connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the right information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space.

To accomplish this, we invite you to create Semapedia-Tags which are in fact cellphone-readable physical hyperlinks. You can create such Tags easily yourself by choosing and pasting a Wikipedia URL into the form above. Once created, you put the Tags up at their according physical location. You just hyperlinked your world! Others can now use their cellphone to ‘click’ your Tag and access the information you provided them.

Now, what got me excited was this thought: archaeological materials, standing remains, different phases of a building, crates of finds from last year’s dig…. all of these could have a barcode printed out for them, from either one of these websites. The investigator could then simply take a photo with her camera phone, and instantly have the information. No more fiddly paper records covered with coffee stains and cigarette ashes…

Imagine also the scene at the museum. Visitor spots an artefact on the shelf that piques his interest. He spots the barcode, photographs it, and instantly he has access to the excavation report. I could imagine subsequent secondary literature also being linked through to the barcode.

My hands shake too much for me to be of much use writing site codes and catalogue numbers onto objects using indelible ink. But a barcode that can be printed out on demand – that I can get my shaky hands on.

The London Charter

Speaking of archaeological VR, the London Charter is worth consideration. Its objectives are below (I think the last one on the list is especially important), but there’s a lot of material to mull over…

Objectives

The London Charter seeks to establish principles for the use of 3d visualisation methods and outcomes in the research and communication of cultural heritage in order to:

Provide a benchmark having widespread recognition among stakeholders.

Promote intellectual and technical rigour in such uses.

Enable appropriate evaluative criteria and methods to be determined and applied.

Stimulate debate on methodological issues.

Offer a robust foundation upon which specialist subject communities can build detailed standards and guides.

Ensure appropriate access and sustainability strategies to be determined and applied.

Enable 3d visualisation authoritatively to contribute to the study, interpretation and management of cultural heritage assets.

Of Chapels, Clutter, and Archaeological VR

In the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog, an interesting note:

The Sistine Chapel Reaches Second Life

Steven J. Taylor, director of academic computing at Vassar College, has recreated the interior of the Sistine Chapel in the virtual world Second Life. On the college’s Second Life island, visitors can step inside a pale-yellow building and view a replica of the frescoes that adorn the 15th-century chapel in Vatican City. They can even fly up to the ceiling to get a close up of the nine stories from the Book of Genesis painted by Michelangelo. The purpose of the project is to help students learn about art and architecture, says Mr. Taylor, who created the interior from photographs.

Now that’s something a regular field trip to Rome can’t provide. The last time I was at the RL Sistine Chapel, there were so many school groups and tourists, that the whole experience was rather off-putting. Plus, with the crowd, there was no opportunity to really experience the space the way it was intended – as a place of worship, rather than another check-mark on someone’s itinerary of Europe.

That by the way is what archaeological reconstruction should aim to provide – an embodied experience of a place otherwise impossible to perceive. Too often, archaeological virtual reality is little more than pretty pictures, a rhetoric of display that says, ’see, look how much effort we’ve put into this! It must be right!’. Now, I know that’s a bit cynical, but on a related note see for instance Troels Myrup Kristensen on the Rome Reborn 1.0 project website.

Notice the absence of signs of life – no people, no animals, no junk, no noises, no smells, no decay. The scene is utterly stripped of all the clutter that is what really fascinates us about the past. The burning question is whether this kind of (expensive and technology-heavy) representation really gives us fundamentally new insights into the past? From what I’ve seen so far of this project, I’m not convinced that this is the case.

Which brings up another important point about archaeological VR – Troel’s point about the clutter. Second Life is a very tidy place. It cleans up after itself. Every time I’m in there, and I discard something, my email fills up with notes from Second Life telling me that everything has been returned to my inventory. Pretty hard to do some digital archaeology if the digital material culture follows its owners home. Digital archaeology, or archaeology of the metaverse (I argue in my Brock paper that this should properly be called ‘xenoarchaeology’) at the moment might be classified best as a subcategory of landscape archaeology… maybe I should ask Linden Labs to allow litter and decay…